Build a VPN Server

Meeting Notes

Intro and News

• Presenter: Eduardo Robles
• Huawei announces HarmonyOS, an open-source platform for every device
• Linux Journal end publication

Tutorial

Before you get started. You will need OpenVPN client on your computer. Get the windows installer here. Or in Ubuntu 18.04 you can install via apt like so

 sudo apt-get install openvpn

You will also need a VPS (virtual private server) to install the OpenVPN Server software. I used DigitalOcean, there cheap and reliable servers. If you want to try out their VPS you can use my referral code for $50 credit.

https://m.do.co/c/370923819d90

Getting started

Setup your VPS with Ubuntu 18.04 Server. This process can work with CentOS, Fedora, or Debian but I used Ubuntu 18.04. You will need root access to run this script so be sure to be root or an administrator.

Now got to the following Github project and check out the easily OpenVPN installer script.

https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

This script makes it super easy to setup an OpenVPN server. It automates the most complicated parts of setting up OpenVPN. If you were doing this manually you would have to setup:

1. Server certificates
2. Server keys
3. Server configurations
4. Client cerficates
5. Client keys
6. Client configurations

It’s a lot of steps and most have other smaller steps to configure. So if you were doing this manually you could potentially mess up. So this script makes it super easy. So easy that you only need a few steps to complete. But if you wanted to go through the manual process you can check the tutorial that Digital Ocean created here.

Ok, so once you are in your VPS simply run the openvpn-install script.

This will do the following:

1. Download Openvpn Server
2. Configure the server with the configurations you set
3. Create the certificates and keys for both server and client
4. Create an OVPN file to connect from client machine.

Once the script is done, simply download the OVPN to the client machine. Then run the following command to connect to the server.

sudo openvpn /path/to/downloaded/client-config.ovpn

It will automatically connect to the server and setup you encrypted connection! Once it’s connected you are done! You are now surfing the web safely with you new OpenVPN server!